Parisian Service (Haviland service): Snow (no. 6) | Cleveland Museum of Art

Young Woman Standing Under an Umbrella in the Snow | Cleveland Museum of Art

Snow-Flake Side Dishes | Cleveland Museum of Art

According to the box lid, this set of 6 side dishes, or <em>mukōzuke</em>, are “snow-flower style” (<em>sekkashiki</em>), having mouths shaped like snowflakes. Their mouths, which have 6 lobes and scalloped edges, are traced with brown iron oxide at the rim. The outside of each bowl is glazed with a very bright pink over the basin and foot, and the inside is left white. From directly above, one sees a snowflake-like shape, and from the side, they seem to float above a rosy ground.

Parisian Service (Haviland service): Snow (no. 6) | Cleveland Museum of Art

Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain: Fol. 2v, January - Snow Landscape | Cleveland Museum of Art

This manuscript was illuminated by a circle of at least five highly organized manuscript painters active in the Flemish cities of Ghent and Bruges. The principal illuminator was Alexander Bening, who painted the majority of the book's miniatures. Manuscripts produced by this circle of artists are renowned for the decoration of their borders, which typically feature a rich variety of realistically painted flowers, birds, and butterflies. This prayer book, called a book of hours, was intended not for a cleric but for the private devotions of a lay person—in this case, Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain (1451–1504); her coat of arms embellishes the book's frontispiece. It is unlikely that the book was commissioned by the Queen herself; rather, she probably received it as a diplomatic gift from someone courting her patronage, perhaps Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros. A Franciscan friar, Jimenez was dependent upon Isabella for his advancement, first to the post of Queen's confessor in 1492, and then to Archbishop of Toledo in 1495.

Untitled (Woods in Snow) | Cleveland Museum of Art

Young Woman Standing Under an Umbrella in the Snow | Cleveland Museum of Art

Carnival in the Snow | Cleveland Museum of Art

In this watercolor, acrobats and circus jugglers emerge from a complex pattern of shapes and colors. Two jugglers share a face and torso. A member of Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich, Paul Klee believed that the elements of color and shape alone could carry connotations of emotions, moods, and subjective feelings. His method was to begin painting without a subject, only settling upon something that could be recognized after layering colored form upon colored form.

Umbrellas in Snow

Churchyard with Snow | Cleveland Museum of Art